Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday August 15, 2015 @01:44PM
from the reach-out-and-surveil-someone dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Newly disclosed NSA documents show that the agency gained access to billions of emails through a "highly collaborative" relationship with AT&T. The company provided access from 2003 to 2013, including technical assistance to carry out court orders permitting wiretapping. "The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency. One document reminds NSA officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, noting, 'This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.'" The new files don't indicate whether the partnership currently exists, but the government has been doing its best to keep corporate partnerships hidden. The article also notes that "In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the N.S.A. after 'a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,' according to an internal agency newsletter."

Of course AT&T had a choice, they could have gone to court. That would have stopped it right there. What could the NSA do, shut them down? And yes, this is news because the level of spying and complicity is even worse than previously reported. I am sure as more leaks come out, it will turn out to be far worse still.

The tech savvy crowd here at/. should be enraged that this is what our government is doing to the Internet. But maybe now that we have heard so much crap about what the government does that it just induces a yawn. I suppose that is a good thing for the NSA. I personally am outraged.

Maybe you are right, and our "Justice Dept." is that corrupt. Sounds like time for a change. So how do you get people to vote for what is in their own best interest, and stop voting for the military industrial complex-controlled politicians? There do seem to be a few running this time around.

Were they even legally allowed to disclose that the NSA had requested cooperation? How can you go to court when the judge doesn't have the necessary security clearance to hear the case and you'll certainly never be able to get a fair jury of citizens that way.

AT&T owes the government some favors. You may recall they were broken up into smaller companies in the 1980s. Well not long after AT&T quietly bought up nearly everything again. Don't think that went over without anyone noticing.

Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before SBC purchased AT&T.[1] The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic[3] and, as analyzed by J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore "the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic."[4] Former director of the NSA's World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been installed throughout the United States.[2]

You always have a choice. AT&T chose to collude with the government to undermine the US Constitution in exchange for money. That's treason. You're a little too quick to absolve them. It's just like the officers in Nazi Germany that had no choice but to murder innocent Jews. Those are crimes, and they did have a choice. They chose evil instead of good, out of cowardice. Just like AT&T. AT&T are cowards and traitors.

The Fugitive Slave Act made it against the law to help escaped slaves. The Reich Citizenship Law made Jews non-people with no rights. For both of those laws (and many others), people resisted, even though in some cases they risked death in doing so. If what your government is doing is morally wrong, saying that you were just following orders and had no choice isn't good enough...

The trick then is to find some part of the internet that is not being spied upon, an ISP that can be trusted, trunk lines that are not compromised, etc. I suspect there are naive people out there saying "boy, I'm glad I've got Verizon!"

So, just assume it is ALL compromised. That means be careful; encrypt stuff, anonymize as much as possible, even use less internet overall. But most people won't do this, they want their twitter. Quite a lot of people seem to have zero concept of privacy so they won't car

Back before the NSA and FBI implemented their current all encompassing digital surveillance plan, one of the considerations raised was that if it became known, then it would encourage opportunistic and ubiquitous encryption which they had been fighting for years and would have a dire effect on lawful surveillance. Well guess what? All of that has come to pass and ubiquitous and opportunistic encryption of lawful traffic and storage is starting to happen leading to the current cries from law enforcement ab

And let's not forget that Joseph Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest, maintains that the series of events that led to his imprisonment began when he refused to capitulate to the government's surveillance demands.

NSA got access to everything, blah blah. The NSA is our new overlord and conscience. So I'm contrarian here and curious: what did AT&T get out of this?

Or are they just happy they can listen in to phone calls again way back when the (actual) operators supported party-lines across multiple families and literally did the dialing for you?

-----

For those of you too young to remember: a party line was a single shared telephone line spread across multiple houses where anyone could pick up the phone and hear a conversation that another family was having -- that's how it was designed; no single line per each room in a house but a single line shared between disparate houses.

If someone was calling, the ringtone (a clapper striking a physical bell attached to the phone) was a different pattern for each house so the correct person would know to pick up.

Speed-dial? Touch-tones? Rotary? Dial-tone? No, you flashed the hook to get the attention of the mostly-present operator and verbally told them the name or number to dial for you.

I've got a phone like that hanging in the kitchen. Unattached and unused for decades, of course, until I give in and pay for the "Twilight Zone" option.

While in college I worked at one of the last, if not the last, cord board in California in Woodland. It was a gas, plugging in when a light went on, picking outgoing trunk lines to dial through, getting connected to really obscure places, timing calls with paper tickets and clocks. No day ever made the lights light up like the day Elvis died.

What did they get out of it? Retroactive immunity for performing illegal warrantless wiretapping at the behest of the government, of course. I remember well back when Obama was starting to get popular and people kept saying how he would be different and bring "hope" and "change", yet supported this attrocity: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07... [nytimes.com]

The NSA is our new overlord and conscience. So I'm contrarian here and curious: what did AT&T get out of this?

Money [freedom-to-tinker.com]. AT&T charged the NSA for access to their network. The linked article is from 2007 and suggests that the only way for a backbone provider to make money is to sell access to the government. This is not new information for anyone who has been watching.

I worked as a switch technician at several MCI Points Of Presence during the 80's/90's - this kind of thing was going on at several Central Offices - generally all the main POPs for a metro area have a locked "wiretap room" that only people with badges and guns can get into and out of - it was verboten for use CO techs to enter, see, or even mention these rooms even exist, but they do. Israel provided much of the tech for the FBI and other agencies in the COs. There are also many COG/COOP sites with direc

Re peering and use of US private sector.
Cheap international standards that are US friendly in terms of new equipment costs and international peering costs via, to and from the USA.
Subsidized funding builds an international reputation that ensured no other nation gets ideas about expensive direct links or distant interconnects of their own?
The EU or South American call or data will pass via the US and then finds is final cheap destination.
That also cuts down on the risk of power, space, cooling, band

The NSA wasn't "fucking the wife" and it really is a partnership. AT&T is a loyal corporate citizen and was doing its loyal patriotic duty. If you were AT&T, wouldn't you? Isn't the NSA and the rest of the state police apparatus there to protect AT&T and its class?

Which pretty much makes it explicit that when the NSA comes to your CEO, they're rude, obnoxious and demanding. And you can't say no.

"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nat

Isn't this a little old by this point? I mean, we've known that the NSA taps off every CO at the optical level for about as long as the timeframe you're suggesting... if you're talking phones, even longer.

The published/public reasons for datacaps are to "reduce network congestion" and that various telcos would like to charge [gouge] their customers more money.

Many articles have debunked the "network congestion" argument. But, telcos would like to charge higher prices so they continue to float the myth ad naseum. It's also a great cover.

Maybe the only "congestion" is that while it would be relatively easy/inexpensive to build out networks to handle it [routers, etc.], it would be prohibitively more expensive to add the requisite amount of surveillance equipment to handle the load [if they could]. Otherwise, the "secret room" inside a telco's CO would have to become the "secret floor" and eventually the "secret building".

Charging customers higher prices for congestion is a misnomer. But, instead of using this capital [or any capital for that matter] to build out networks to accommodate legitimate internet traffic increases, like any reasonably/responsibly managed company, diverting it to a telco's "black budget" would be harder to justify [even internally] to an auditor.

The "secret room" idea is just getting access for a splitter in any nation, part of the USA. More splitters per room is not a big problem with optical.
A location is vital, where data enters, exits the USA, 5 eye nations and other sites. Leverage, partnership.
The filtering is done in other parts of the world as needed, realtime or over time with all the mirrored data ie collect it all.
Scale does not seem to be a problem for most advanced nations anymore. Australia, NZ can get all of Asia without US or

We have the workorders for that installation of this program. This is not news. The documents garnishing further proof is "of interest" at best. Slashdot going down hill like the Roman Empire and the American Hegemony.